Flashback Friday: Electronic Computers And Applied Mathematics

In 2013 there is hardly anywhere you can go without running into a computer. Be it as simple as a credit card reader in a drive up fast food restaurant, or a full sized workstation at the checkout counter in a retail store, they are everywhere in ours lives at this time. There was, however, a time where people were still mystified by these machines, and very few of them had even seen one in person as they took up entire rooms.

This 1961 educational film tries to break down how computers work for people, but remember this was a time when they weren’t used for much more than giant calculators and sorting a bit of data, all of which was stored on punch cards. Essentially, the phone in your pocket is more powerful than the computers you see in this video.

No matter how laughable these may be to look at now, they played an important role in the evolution of where we are today with technology. As you type out your comment below, just think about the fact that a little over half a century ago someone had to work out how to get one letter into a computer at a time let alone an entire sentence.